My wife and I recently shot some 13 year old 44 mag. reloads. The were loaded with H110 at 26.5gr with a 200gr Nosler JHP and CCI Mag Pistol primers. The max in the Speer rel. man. is 27.5 gr. and I understand it's dangerous to go below 10% of max. with H110. My 26.5 was worked up and at the time they were loaded worked fine. Today when we shot the rounds several of them split the case. Some of the other bullets in the cylinder had come out of the crimp. On the bullets that came out of the case due to recoil I examined and smelled the powder, it didn't seem acrid. I did notice in the case a brown powder on the inside of the brass. Could the powder have been bad? Were the rounds on the verge of detonating? Threw the rest away. These were packed in air tight Ammo cans. Any help would be appreciated.

Hmmm...rusty, brown colored powder is usualy a sign of smokeless powder gone bad.

Thanks!

The danger with H110 reduced loads is not detonation, but incoplete ingintion and reslulting bullet stuck in the barrel.

I have never seen any guns damaged with detonation, but I have seen plenty damaged by stuck bullets.

I don't think this load is under loaded. It is 4% below maximum, which is within the 5-10% maximum down loading allowed by the powder manufacturer.

Thanks No. 1. Complete ignition as far as I could tell. Thanks for the info. Time to Reload! I need to replace old rounds, THANKS FOR THE INFO! PS: Maybe the primers went bad, who knows, thanks again!

Not likely to be bad primers. Primers do not gain power, they lose it when they go bad.

Were the loads heavily compressed? I have had some bad experiences with heavily compressed loads using ball powder that had sat on the shelf for a few years; the loads worked great when fresh. When I pulled the bullets of a few rounds I found the powder to have clumped into large chunks which were hard to get out of the case. Have you pulled any of the rounds apart? I have burned many pounds of H110, W296 and Wc820 and have never experienced this problem with any of them, though.